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Professor David Gloriam receives DKK 35 million in funding from the Lundbeck Foundation Collaborative Projects programme

Drugs for neuropsychiatric conditions often have severe side effects and insufficient therapeutic effects, causing most drugs in development to fail. For this reason, different conditions, including schizophrenia and substance use disorders that often are seen in the same patients, are lacking satisfactory therapies today.

In this highly collaborative project, Professor David Gloriam, University of Copenhagen, and his team of collaborators set out to develop data-driven design tools to improve the efficacy of drugs targeting psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and substance use disorders – such as addiction.

The project "Data-driven drug design tools to target therapeutic over side effects" will develop new methods to identify and test how the neuronal disease mechanisms behind schizophrenia and substance use disorders can be better targeted by drugs with more selective mechanism/actions. This could pave the way for more effective treatments with fewer side effects.

The project brings together Danish and US research groups studying brain receptors activated by the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine, commonly known as the molecules of happiness and reward.

The main objective of the research is to develop data-driven drug design tools catalyzing drug design for over 200 receptor drug targets. The data-driven tools will be validated in laboratory experiments and later the resulting functional probes will be used in neurons, rats, and mice to test and expand druggable disease mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and substance use disorders.

Co-applicants and collaborators on the project are:

• Amy H. Newman, Scientific Director, NIH, USA

• Professor Bryan L. Roth, University of Carolina, USA

• Professor Ulrik Gether, Head of Department, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

 

 

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The other Collaborative Projects grant recipients - 2022: